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Standard-Bearers
The Standard-Bearers are a militaristic eastern European faction in the aborted Fallout IOT, seemingly conceived as a more aggressive alternate-universe New Hetmanate. The faction itself is descended from the armed forces of Dity Svobody, a Ukrainian independence movement that emerged in the wake of the Great War. History With news of American experiments into the Forced Evolutionary Virus surfacing worldwide in 2077, Soviet intelligence scrambled to catch up. Attempting to exploit the Pentagon's tunnel vision on China, the KGB hastily arranged Operation Firebrand in a bid to glean data of the experiments. The mission was a marginal failure, acquiring some of the research data but failing to obtain viable samples; nevertheless, a research centre was established in Ukraine to replicate the FEV. The project was cut short with the onset of the Great War, and all progress was lost when the lab was destroyed, its contents leaking out into the surrounding countryside. The immediate aftermath of the war witnessed the implosion of Moscow's hegemony. Commanders of military districts were well-positioned to declare jurisdictional autonomy, while satellite states and 'core' SSRs made a break for independence. The experiment was short-lived, however, as the fallout settled and a second wave of fatalities obliterated any hope for sustaining political order. Those who could retreated to the fallout shelters; resource exhaustion from its own previous wars meant European networks were not as well-crafted as the American Vaults, nor were they designed for the long haul. Military bunkers were slightly better in this regard, and the first fledgling surface communities that developed in the post-apocalyptic period typically orbited around garrisons. With the support of the military districts in Kyiv and Odesa, the aborted attempt at an independent Ukrainian state in 2077 was revitalized. By 2105 Dity Svobody was in relatively firm control of most of the lands north of the Black Sea, although actual political influence tapered off sharply beyond the villages surrounding the bases. Soon enough, the fledgling "state" ran into competition with other districts-turned-kingdoms, as well as roaming bands of marauders and post-apocalyptic cults. In response to mounting threats across the frontier, the scattered armies consolidated into a single official fighting force dubbed the Freedom Guard. In 2112, a mutant species of humanoid animals began to appear across the Dnipro basin that exhibited extremely high intelligence and a crude familiarity with human tools. Decades later, documents detailing Operation Firebrand would suggest they were an accidental byproduct of the Soviet-era experiments. The creatures, dubbed dyki lyudy, were recognized as distinguished from the usual monsters of the wastelands, but were still regarded with suspicion and generally ostracized in the same way as ghouls. Important changes began in 2123 when, due to hostile encroachment in the west, the Freedom Guard began recruiting the dyki lyudy to bolster its manpower. The political leadership was extremely skeptical, but was won over in 2127 when the creatures proved their combat professionalism (not to mention patriotism) during the siege on Odesa by the forces of the "Family of Blood", a Romanian clan. The Grand Alliance Dity Svobody entered into a loose alliance with a handful of district-kingdoms in the east to stave off the growing power of northern warlords in 2142. The arrangement endured for a century despite frequent political hardships and disputes amongst the respective leaderships, even as military bonds were steadily strengthened. The sharpest and longest-lasting divide was between the Kazakh generals in the east, who thought the Ukrainians were overstepping their authority, and the Freedom Guard, who felt its allies weren't pulling their weight. The Confederacy of the Seven Bands was especially skeptical of dyki lyudy, and often derided the Ukrainians as "a country run by mutants". In 2196 a new Russian opponent calling itself the Blessed Empire attacked the allies with hitherto unimaginable force. While the Empire was beaten back by 2200 (the Czar himself was killed in battle), the war inflicted tremendous devastation on the alliance and its members agreed to an amalgamation of their armed forces. Although the political environment began to settle, internal tensions heightened as the Seven Bands found their standing diminished first by the consolidation of steppe tribes north of the Caucasus into a third sphere of influence, second, from the increasing clout of Odesa through the primacy of the Freedom Guard. Apprehension over the dyki lyudy fed into these concerns, and not without cause: shunned everywhere else, they were practically driven to Dity Sovobody, and were now outnumbering human soldiers in many units. Relations seemed slated to improve with talk of a federal government that would more equitably distribute power and resources between the three major regions, but tragedy struck in 2258 when Premier Olekchenko was murdered the day he was poised to formally implement the reforms. Onur Serkanev, leader of the Seven Bands, accused the dyki lyudy of planning the assassination as part of a racial conspiracy, although there was speculation it might have been a Bandsman separatist; the gunman was never found. Almost immediately afterward, Ukraine was attacked by a Black Horsemen war party from Slovakia, and the commander of the Freedom Guard Mykhaylo Tarasenko instituted martial law. The Blue Steppe Riders rushed to support, but Serkanev deliberately delayed any Kazakh troops dispatch, claiming they should be held in reserve to protect the Riders' lands. True enough, just as the Horsemen were expelled the Riders were overrun by marauders from the Caucasus, but Serkanev again delayed a response, this time without explanation. As a result, the Riders' domestic government was virtually destroyed, and the Freedom Guard assumed administrative responsibility as it had done in the west. Tarasenko announced he would act as interim head of state until civilian administration was re-established and promoted himself to generalissimo. Serkanev, oblivious to his own culpability in it all, accused Tarasenko of a coup; Tarasenko replied with a furious indictment of Serkanev's failure to respond to both invasions. Serkanev eventually backed down after receiving a guarantee that the Seven Bands would be granted greater autonomy over their portion of the army. Civil war Thirteen years passed; the Freedom Guard steadily fortified its position, but numerous petty wars and a handful of more significant campaigns hampered attempts at re-establishing Dity Svobody in the civil sphere. Tarasenko resigned midway through 2271, appointing a dyki lyudy general, Yulia Nastunyeshyn, as his successor. This was the final straw for Serkanev: declaring Tarasenko's original rise to power a "dictatorship in disguise" and that the Seven Bands "refuse to be indentured servants to inhuman mutants", he claimed direct authority over his garrison in contravention of the alliance charter. Nastunyeshyn responded immediately, denouncing Serkanev's action as "criminal" and himself a "traitor", and began mobilizing the Freedom Guard to retake the district by force. The result was a veritable civil war between the Ukrainians and the Blue Steppe Riders, whose allegiance was essentially to the Freedom Guard, and the Seven Bands and their affiliate tribes, whose loyalty lay with Serkanev. At heart was a mutual misunderstanding of intent: the Guard believed itself to be the servants of the Dity Svobody movement, which had grown to embody the alliance's overarching interest, while Serkanev thought the Guard were stooges of a mutant-dominated clique. Whereas race had vanished from western discourse, it was the lynchpin of the separatist movement. Because these dissonant values had never been properly reconciled during the alliance's early days, they would now be settled on the battlefield. The Kazakhs had superior equipment, but the Ukrainians had superior soldiers. Largely as a result of their own heel-dragging, the Seven Bands had not participated in the joint operations and officer exchanges mandated by the consolidated armed forces, and so had never truly grasped the potency of the dyki lyudy in combat. Mutant physiology granted them inherent advantages, and some individuals were so strongly-built that they could survive injuries normally mortal to their own kind; but they were also smart, trained to the same calibre as the Ukrainians' elite units. The Kazakhs held the lion's share of combat vehicles, but these were slow, mechanically unreliable, and could not compete with the agility of foot soldiers, leaving both sides roughly evenly-matched. The war lasted for two years along a fairly stable front, until the Bandsmen encountered military supply shortages that tipped the scales in the western allies' favour. Serkanev's supporters continued to fight fanatically up until he was captured in a salient on his line headquarters. Generalissima Nastunyeshyn, herself commanding from the front, executed him in a show of force; the demoralized Kazakhs, whose own leadership was as monolithic as their foes', officially surrendered, although scattered resistance continued until 2276. The Future The Freedom Guard now found itself in total control of the alliance, and in recognition of its vanguard status it rechristened itself the Standard-Bearers of the Revolution. For the next four years it sought to repair the longstanding antipathy between east and west in preparation for the monumental reconstruction effort, in wake of both the civil war and the regional conflicts that had precipitated it. As Kazakh hardware was disseminated west, limited industry began to emerge to salvage old war machines and recover centuries-neglected infrastructure. With political reconciliation reached by 2277, the Standard-Bearers could at last set their sights outward. SPECIAL * Science: 6 * Politics: 7 * Economics: 5 * Combat: 8 * Intelligence: 7 * Arts: 4 * Luck: 3 Category:Factions Category:Fallout IOT